Mark St. Pierre 'lied to me,' defense witness tells jurors

Mark St. Pierre's defense against federal bribery charges suffered a devastating blow Thursday as lawyers he once employed testified that the businessman lied or omitted key facts when he sought legal ways to pay old pal and city official Greg Meffert.

Ted Jackson, The Times-PicayuneMark St. Pierre enters federal court last week with his wife.

It got so bad that St. Pierre's trial attorney, Eddie Castaing, tried to get one attorney -- Danny Drake -- declared a hostile witness.

St. Pierre has been on trial for nine days on charges of bribery, money laundering and wire fraud. The government finished presenting its case to the jury Wednesday, after days of testimony that St. Pierre paid Meffert more than $800,000 in bribes and kickbacks in exchange for $6.2 million in no-bid technology work at City Hall, and then funneled Anthony Jones, another city official, $22,000 in kickbacks.

Castaing told the jury he planned to prove that his client's arrangement with Meffert was blessed by lawyers. But no sooner did Castaing begin his case than his witnesses begin undercutting that claim.

Drake, a Mississippi lawyer who had known Meffert for years and was his personal attorney, said he was hired to represent St. Pierre's NetMethods firm. Drake said he tried to help St. Pierre in 2005 and 2006 find a legal way to share his profits on jobs outside City Hall with Meffert, even though Meffert was the city technology chief and St. Pierre's boss at City Hall at the time.

But when he was trying to advise the pair, Drake said he didn't know St. Pierre was in the midst of paying Meffert hundreds of thousands of dollars.

Drake said he was unaware that Meffert had been given a NetMethods credit card until one day in 2005 when he met him for lunch. Meffert plopped down the card to pay, and Drake got upset. He told his client he was engaging in "graft," he testified Thursday.

Meffert brushed it off, telling his attorney the credit card was only for minor expenses.

For the next year and a half, Meffert and St. Pierre sought Drake's advice to try to come up with a legal arrangement to justify the money flowing to Meffert. Drake said he proceeded, assuming Meffert had stopped using the credit card.

"I thought (the credit card use) was over," Drake said.

Later he told jurors: "Mark lied to me."

Drake testified that a lawyer for national wireless provider EarthLink was nervous about the relationship between St. Pierre and Meffert, and therefore required that St. Pierre sign an affidavit in June 2006 swearing that NetMethods had never compensated Meffert and wasn't contemplating doing so in the future.

Drake said he didn't tell the company's attorney, Sandra Gardiner, about Meffert's NetMethods credit card. Under cross-examination, Drake said that knowing what he knows now, St. Pierre lied in the affidavit.

After that, Castaing asked U.S. District Judge Eldon Fallon for the right to ask leading questions of a hostile witness. Fallon said no.

Drake also didn't know that Meffert had persuaded Mayor Ray Nagin to issue an executive order exempting technology contracts from the city's bidding rules, at least not until prosecutor Matthew Coman showed it to him a few weeks ago.

"That's a license to steal," he said, shocked.

Drake, who referred to notes he took at the time, said he thought St. Pierre and Meffert were in the clear if St. Pierre divested himself from Imagine Software, the city's main technology vendor, and then gave Meffert a 24 percent ownership in NetMethods.

A $500,000 buyout of St. Pierre's share in the company wasn't complete until mid-2006.

St. Pierre also employed attorneys from the regional law firm Baker Donelson. Starting in September 2004, St. Pierre asked lawyers there whether he could use the newly formed NetMethods to hire Meffert's wife, Linda.

"That would almost certainly be problematic," Baker Donelson attorney and close friend Kent Lambert told St. Pierre at the time, Lambert testified.

Lambert left the door open slightly, noting there were no clear rulings on the ethics of a city official's spouse working for a city vendor if it's at a separate company that does no city work, which is what St. Pierre wanted to do.

Lambert testified that he could see "good arguments both ways."

But Robert Cheatwood, Baker Donelson's managing partner in Louisiana, said St. Pierre never told anyone at the firm about the $38,000 check he paid Linda Meffert in November 2004. Cheatwood said that over five years of representing St. Pierre, the businessman never asked anyone at Baker Donelson whether he could legally give Meffert an all-access credit card, whether he could use a company employee to pay for Meffert's homeowner expenses or whether he could provide cash for poker games, strippers or prostitutes.

It wasn't until April 2005 that St. Pierre asked the firm's attorneys whether he could enter into a new business relationship with Meffert. Lambert said that at that point, he assumed there was no existing relationship, even though Meffert had already charged more than $30,000 to the NetMethods credit card.

"Mr. Meffert wanted to be compensated right from the get-go, and there was no way that we could come up with a relationship that would work until Mark St. Pierre severed all ties with companies that did work for the city of New Orleans, and Mark wasn't ready to do that," Lambert said.

Cheatwood said his firm didn't learn about the credit card until February 2009, when Meffert was forced to testify in a deposition that he had used the card to take Nagin and his family to Hawaii. When the firm heard that, it dropped St. Pierre as a client and recommended he get a criminal defense lawyer, Cheatwood said.

St. Pierre contends that he spent $600,000 for all the legal advice over the years.